Memory lane ... the steps of the Royal Court, where this theatre reviewer once sat weeping for a lost love. Photograph: David Sillitoe

J Alfred Prufrock measured out his life with coffee spoons; mine can be mapped by journeys to and from theatres around the country. Last week I drove across London to the Arcola with my 82-year-old dad to see Knives in Hens, the journey punctuated by reminiscences about old haunts, places we had worked, memories suddenly recalled and brought vividly to life. The journey wasn't separate from the show; they were part and parcel of each other. Often we think of theatre simply as the event itself, but the journey to and from the theatre, the seats in which we sit, the people we go with and the building itself are all part of the experience too.

A theatre, particularly when it's local, can be an essential part of the fabric of people's lives, part of their own personal maps of the world. A friend's widowed mother who was a regular attendee, with her husband, at the old Hampstead Theatre, was devastated when the new venue was built, feeling as if the umbilical cord of memory had been irrevocably cut. In Pleasance Two, in Edinburgh, I like to sit in the centre of the first row because that's where I was sitting when I realised with total certainty that I was pregnant with my first child. Whenever I'm at the Polka I am taken back in time to my children's early theatregoing trips. As I walk up the steps of the Royal Court, I always recall sitting there weeping for a lost love, who abandoned me for ever at the interval of a show. I love the dizzy view from the balcony in Wyndhams because it takes me straight back to childhood.

I have a friend whose father took her to see every show at the Donmar in her last year at home before going to university, a theatregoing rite of passage that wasn't just about the shows seen but about time shared together. Her father died last year, but now, whenever she goes to the Donmar, she tries to book the seats in which they always sat: B18 and 19 in the circle. Unlike the West End Whingers, I don't have a problem with unreserved seating (although I will kill anyone who gets to that strange little corner seat in the Old Red Lion before me), but I did get quite upset on a trip to the Novello recently when our grand circle seats were upgraded. The seats we were given were better and twice the price I'd paid, but they weren't the seats I had personally chosen, the seats I knew I had sat in before and which I wanted to sit in again. As the Artful Manager recently suggested in a brilliant blog post, every theatre seat has a history. He went on to pose the question: "What if each seat in a theatre space had its own story, written by each occupant over time? What if the tenant of that seat could learn about a previous tenant and their experiences, then add their own to the narrative, and pass it along to the next person who happens to sit there?" It would be an intriguing project for any theatre to initiate.

This emotional connection with a particular seat or building is one that theatres, particularly our regional buildings, must surely build on, especially at a time when local as well as national funding is likely to come under pressure. Bristol Old Vic was saved, in part, through the sheer affection of local people for the theatre, and the new regime appears to be recognising that. One project in development is local company Uninvited Guests' Make Better Please, a show inspired by personal experiences of the theatre and the streets around it.

But what of a new theatre such as the Curve in Leicester, which still looks and smells brand new? As yet, it has no history, and it has severed its link with the past with a change of name and a new location in a different part of town from the old Haymarket Theatre. The Curve's challenge is not just to make great work that lures in audiences, but to discover how it can become part of the community it serves. It needs to develop the ties that bind audiences to buildings, and make them a crucial part of the geographical, social and emotional landscape.